(Photo by Erik (HASH) Hersman; from Flickr)
When the Florida GOP-controlled Legislature passed and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an election reform bill (SB 524) in the winter of 2022, most of the stories surrounding it focused on the creation of a police force dedicated to pursuing voter fraud.
But the measure also banned ranked-choice voting (RCV) in any election in the state and preempted any conflicting local ordinances.
Previously termed instant-runoff voting, the preemption of local governments from enacting such a voting system was a blow to longtime advocates in Florida, but they’re not giving up. They say it may take years to finance a campaign to repeal the ban, but that remains their ultimate goal.
“We’re going to walk before we can run, but yes, at some point in time — and I’m not going to say when — we have to do it,” said John Severini, chair of Rank My Vote Florida, a nonpartisan organization founded in 2019 that remains active despite the ban on the voting procedure.
How it works
Ranked-choice voting is a process that allows voters to select candidates in order of preference. If there are say, five candidates running for office, the voters would mark them 1-5, with the candidate ranked as “1” being their top preference, following up by listing their second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-place choices.
If one candidate is the first choice of more than half of the voters, he or she wins the race. But if no candidate receives the majority of the vote, the candidate with the least amount of support is eliminated, and the votes for that eliminated candidate are redistributed to the voters’ next choices. The process continues until a candidate gets more than 50% of the vote.
“It brings people back to voting for people, and not for the parties,” said Sarasota Vice Mayor Jen Ahern-Koch, a strong supporter who says that the system reduces partisanship.
“It just says to the voter, here’s a person. Do your research. Is this the person you want in office? Or do you want this one? Which one’s your favorite? Which one’s your second favorite? It takes you, the voter, and says you must now be civically involved in your local and state and national government. And you must do your research.”
RCV is already the law in Maine and Alaska and dozens of cities in the United States, and that could increase after Election Day.
RCV will be on the ballot in six states this fall. In four of them — Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, and Colorado — voters are being asked whether they want to adopt this system in certain elections. In a fifth state, Arizona, voters are being asked to vote on an elections overhaul that would “allow” for RCV in the state’s general elections, but wouldn’t require it, leaving it up to the legislature and the governor whether to adopt the system and to what degree, according to the Arizona Mirror.
Measures on two statewide ballots could eliminate ranked-choice voting: in Missouri (which has not adopted the system yet) and in Alaska, where Republicans, unhappy that in their first use of an open primary ranked-choice voting system in 2022 saw a moderate Democrat, Mary Peltola, winning a House special election over two Republicans (one of them Sarah Palin).
Support for reform
While there hasn’t been any recent public opinion polling on what Floridians think of ranked-choice voting, the electorate is on record wanting to repeal the existing “closed” primary system, which effectively denies more than 29% of voters in Florida not registered with the Republican or Democratic parties the chance to vote in state primaries.
In 2020, 57% of voters in Florida supported Amendment 3, which, if enacted, would have established a nonpartisan “top two” open primary system in statewide elections. While it clearly enjoyed support from the majority of Floridians, it failed to top the 60% threshold required to approve constitutional amendments in the state (it was strongly opposed by both the Republican and Democratic parties).
Elected officials from both major political parties in Florida have championed ranked-choice voting in recent years.
Former Clearwater Mayor Frank Hibbard, a Republican, wanted to implement RCV for city elections a few years ago. That was because the city doesn’t have runoff elections, allowing a candidate to win office with a plurality, not a majority, of the vote.
That happened in March, when a candidate who won a city council seat took it by getting 42% of the vote.
“It also makes it where there’s less negative campaigning. Because you might not be the front-runner, but you’re hoping to get a lot of secondary votes,” Hibbard told Spectrum Bay News 9 in 2021. “So, you might not do some of the negative campaigning that I think everybody dislikes, but it also works, and so unfortunately, candidates use it.”
Ground Zero
Ground zero for the push for ranked-choice voting in Florida is Sarasota, where an overwhelming number of voters (77.6%) approved instant-runoff voting in 2007, when George W. Bush was still in office. It’s the city whose advocacy likely resulted in the state preemption of any local government from considering implementing the procedure when the Legislature banned it in 2022.
Although Sarasota voters approved the proposal 17 years ago, the local supervisor of elections office couldn’t immediately implement RCV because it lacked the technology. In 2019, when the city was able to update its voting systems, then-Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee rejected its request to implement RCV, saying it didn’t “comply with statute and constitutional provisions that govern elections in our state,” according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
But with such a mandate from the voters, city commissioners weren’t giving up. In the fall of 2021, they were in the process of voting to seek a declaratory court judgement to verify that what the voters had approved was supported by the Florida Constitution.
“We had Republicans. We had Democrats. We had Libertarians. We had independents. We even had Green Party folks there,” recounted Ahern-Koch, then a Sarasota city commissioner. “We had folks from across the state, from the other coast. The mayor of Clearwater [Hibbard] spoke in support of it as well.”
She also recalls working on the issue with Joe Gruters, then chairman of the Republican Party of Florida.
“I locked arms with him, and he agreed with me,” she recounted last week. “There were lots of folks locking arms and saying, ‘It’s just in the best interests of the community. It doesn’t benefit the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, specifically.’”
“I remember when Sarasota passed it and, because they did, I was advocating for the state to allow the city to implement it,” Gruters told the Phoenix. “But the pushback was, ‘You know, this is bad essentially for the system, and why would you change anything that’s working? I hate to say it, but that’s a pretty good argument.”
“The bottom line is we were making good inroads — the lawyers presented a very clear case that yes, RCV should be legal, or we should be able to use it,” said John Severini, executive director of Rank My Vote Florida.
“And that’s when they just stuffed [the preemption of RCV] into that voter election bill, and we could never get an answer out of anybody. There was never any discussion and, at the end of the day, it was just like they didn’t want it.’”
GOP Backlash
In banning ranked-choice voting, the GOP-controlled Legislature was ahead of the curve when it came to Republican resistance. In May, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed legislation banning RCV, becoming the fifth state to do so this year and the 10th overall, although none of those states had ever allowed RCV, according to Ballotpedia News.
Summarizing why Alaskans are looking at repealing RCV this November, Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel recently wrote, “Instead of a majority voting for the ‘best’ candidate — someone with history, ideas, principles — it’s a system designed to elect the person who is least offensive to the most people.”
And Hibbard, who left public office last year, is now more skeptical about the concept.
“I also know that it takes more work on the part of the voter, and I question whether folks are willing to invest the time necessary to be informed on a series of candidates and how they would rank them,” he told the Phoenix in an email.
“Republicans are generally more skeptical of changes to voting procedures and election reforms than Democrats,” said Kyle Kondit, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ nonpartisan newsletter on campaigns and elections.
“I do think this is rooted in a belief by Republicans that such changes hurt them more than just maintaining the status quo. A ranked-choice voting system helped Democrats win a House seat in Maine in 2018 and a House seat in Alaska in 2022. Perhaps the Democrats would have won these seats anyway under a normal system, but perhaps not. I do think ranked-choice voting is gaining momentum as a general concept, although it is still fairly rare at the statewide level.”
The Long, Slow Campaign to Repeal in Florida Begins
On the Saturday afternoon of Labor Day weekend in a blocked-off room at an IHOP in North Tampa, seven individuals gathered to watch “Majority Rules,” a recently released documentary that captures the fascinating 2022 races for the U.S. House and Senate in Alaska taking place for the first time under ranked-choice voting.
The gathering was organized by Daria Laycock, the one paid statewide organizer for Rank My Vote Florida.
“This film is a great organizing tool for people who are unfamiliar with ranked choice voting,” she said following the screening. “We’re an education campaign, so we’re focused on informing people about ranked-choice voting. We want people to be aware of it so that if we do introduce a ballot measure or if there is legislation about it, that people will vote favorably about it.”
Susan Grymes and Jutta Kohl traveled from Clearwater to watch the film.
“I think we need to do everything that we can to level the playing field to give more voice to more people,” said Grymes. She recently moved to Florida from Virginia, where in 2020 voters approved amending the state’s Constitution to establish a redistricting commission to eliminate gerrymandering.
“That had to go,” she said. “I think ranked-choice voting is the next thing that needs to happen.”
“I think it’s what [Alaska GOP Sen.] Lisa Murkowski says [in the film]: ‘The politicians can be better, because they can get back to doing their job or representing all of their constituents, not being beholden to their party,’” said Grymes.
“I agree,” said Kohl, Grymes’ friend. “I think that the possibility of getting rid of either side’s extremism would be very important, in my opinion.”
The gathering was intimate, but Severini says his group is planning for the long haul. Noting how a legislative proposal to repeal the banning of ranked-choice voting never received a committee hearing in this year’s session, he realizes that it may require a constitutional amendment to put the issue in front of voters, which will cost likely tens of millions of dollars to be successful.
“Is there a campaign in our future? I don’t want to say,” he said. “It’s not in two years. It may be four. It may be six. Nationally, this needs a lot more traction. Maybe there could be seven states doing it the next time we talk. At some point, there’s a tipping point.”
This story is courtesy of Florida Phoenix.
Florida Phoenix is a nonprofit news site, free of advertising and free to readers, covering state government and politics with a staff of five journalists located at the Florida Press Center in downtown Tallahassee. Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
